Landfalls (47 page)

“Because he's your favorite.”

“He most certainly is not.”

“Then you may believe I've brought him to punish you for the trouble of having to collect you,” he says, helping me in.

“Grandmother!” Pierre cries when I seat myself opposite him. Quite heedless of my frown, he leaves his seat and sits next to me, then takes my hand. I've never liked holding hands. And his fingers are damp and sticky—no doubt he's eaten something sweet and not washed afterward. But as I said earlier, his hands are stronger than mine, so I let him.

 

FOURTEEN

RELICS

Hôtel de La Marine, Paris, March 1829

Spoon & Fork

Barth
é
lemy de Lesseps picked up the spoon and fork, one in each hand, and held them flat against his palms as if weighing them. Peter Dillon watched the Frenchman with a mixture of admiration and anxiety. “The islanders had lots of silver,” he found himself explaining. “But most of it they'd beat into wires for rings and bracelets and the like. These few we found intact in their original forms.”

He knew Lesseps was sixty-three, but the man looked younger, too young to have been a grown man forty years earlier. Perhaps it was his clothes: fashionable blue coat worn over white waistcoat, cambric shirt, neat gray breeches. He was also thin and agile, with a full head of barely graying hair and clear blue eyes. He'd been introduced to Dillon as “Monsieur de Lesseps, our consul general in Portugal,” but Dillon wondered if he could get away with calling him
Viscount
de Lesseps in his book. This aristocratic gentleman was the perfect figure for the narrative's triumphant conclusion in Paris.

But those clear blue eyes were now examining, with an expression of careful detachment, the utensils Dillon had brought back from the island of Vanikoro in the South Pacific. The well-fed and medal-bedecked Baron Hyde de Neuville, minister of the Navy and the man who'd arranged this meeting, stood by watching his countryman with a kind of pompous intensity. Dillon had thought of this meeting with Lesseps, taking place in the most ornate room he'd ever set foot in, as simply the crowning formality to cap his achievements. But he realized now that that wasn't how the two Frenchmen saw it. For them, it wasn't a meeting so much as a
test.
A test he could fail. Even though his discoveries had been touted in newspapers in Sydney, Calcutta, and London. Despite his audience with His Majesty King Charles X. Notwithstanding the L
é
gion d'honneur he'd been promised, or the monetary reward for information on the missing frigates, or the annuity of four thousand francs. None of that mattered—all of it could be rescinded, in fact—if this man, the only known survivor of the Lap
é
rouse expedition, missing these forty years, declined to confirm his findings.

*   *   *

For his part, Barth
é
lemy de Lesseps wished the tall, red-headed Irishman would not stand so very close. The man's recently re-dyed coat and resoled shoes fairly exuded, not just the smell of dye and glue, but an anxious wish to please and be liked. Lesseps had heard rumors about Dillon—that he was a fearless and skilled ship captain, a savvy trader in sandalwood and native artifacts, a man well-versed in the cultures and languages of the South Seas. But he was also known as a brute who dragged his wife along on his travels, beat her when he got drunk, and carried on liaisons with island women at every port of call. The missionaries hated him, as did many of his former associates, who tended to regard him, not as fearless and skilled, but as foolhardy and very, very lucky. Odd how meek the man seemed now, Lesseps thought. He'd met such men before: tyrannical in their own spheres but timid, even obsequious, before men they believed to be their social betters.

He looked at the silver utensils in his hand and sighed. When the minister's letter came, asking him back to France to examine objects recovered from the South Pacific, objects suggesting that the final resting place of the
Boussole
and the
Astrolabe
had at last been discovered, he'd departed on the first ship out of Lisbon and hired the fastest postilions out of Marseilles to convey him to Paris. For wasn't it
this
for which he'd been granted long life through such dangerous times? He'd sat forward in the carriage seat, willing the horses to go faster, impelled by a sense of destiny.

But now he couldn't help it: he wished someone else—someone with more dignity, someone more, well,
French
—had solved the mystery, not this gruff Irishman of uncertain parentage and little education. What could a scarred spoon or tarnished fork prove, anyway? They looked like items one might find anywhere.

“It is hard to say,” he said at last, diffident about his English but aware that both Dillon and the minister were waiting for him to speak. He turned the spoon over, then moved to one of the room's tall, recessed windows to examine it more closely. At the base of the bowl he could just make out a worn design—a seashell, perhaps—and experienced a frisson of familiarity, a memory of elegant officers' dinners aboard the
Astrolabe
, wineglasses glinting in candlelight, meals served on china and eaten with polished utensils. The back of the fork seemed to have a similar design. He ran his thumb over the ribbed silver, then turned to Dillon: “We did have forks and spoons like these.”

Dillon exhaled noisily and Lesseps stepped back, put off by an unpleasant mix of fish and tobacco that wafted his way. “Though I suppose such spoons are common enough,” he added, setting the items down. He heard Dillon inhale sharply and wondered if he might control the man's respiration by alternating encouraging comments with dismissive ones.

Fleur-de-Lis

Unnerved, Dillon led the way to the next item—a decayed fir plank that one of his men had found in the threshold of a hut in Vanikoro. The hut's owner had not been home at the time, but an elderly man who claimed to be the village chief had been pleased to receive one of Dillon's hatchets in exchange for the post. It had been their most successful day on the island: a village full of objects related to the wrecks, most of the villagers away on a fishing expedition, and the “chief” only too happy to enrich himself at his neighbors' expense. Afterward Dillon had amused himself imagining the villagers' reactions when they returned home to discover most of their prized possessions gone.

But Monsieur de Lesseps was regarding the board skeptically, tilting his elegant head, first to one side, then the other. Dillon rushed forward. “See?” he said, pointing to one end of the plank. “Right here.”

Lesseps leaned in and squinted, then suddenly widened his eyes. “A fleur-de-lis?”

“Still visible after all this time,” the minister said helpfully. He spoke English with an American accent, a particular quite at odds with his aristocratic dress and demeanor.

Lesseps replied in French. His neutral expression made it impossible for Dillon to guess what he was saying. Perhaps he suspected the item was fake—a weathered board on which someone had painted the outline of a fleur-de-lis. Dillon wanted to interject, to tell Lesseps about Monsieur Chaigneau, the French attach
é
who'd accompanied the expedition and witnessed the retrieval and inventory of every item. The minister knew about Chaigneau; surely he would defend Dillon's methods and the authenticity of the post.

“We wondered the same thing, Monsieur de Lesseps,” the minister said in English. “But we know of no other French voyage lost in that part of the world.”

So
that
was Lesseps's question. An intelligent question. Dillon was relieved he hadn't interjected.

*   *   *

Lesseps nodded, then switched back to English himself: “There were many fleurs-de-lis on both vessels, of course. But this—” He reached out and ran a finger along the rough surface. “It might have been a—how do you say?—
ornamentation
on the
Boussole
's stern.”

Not that he'd had such intimate knowledge of the ships' architecture, especially the
Boussole
, which he'd been on board only twice in his two years with the expedition. The truth was he'd spent most of his time on the voyage on the
Astrolabe
, playing cards with anyone off duty, reading other men's books, drinking other men's wine. As the expedition's Russian interpreter, he'd had nothing official to do till they reached Petropavlovsk. The first year of the voyage he'd befriended the two La Borde brothers, the younger of whom was a cabinmate. The brothers had begun teaching him navigation. “We're going to make you useful yet, Lesseps,” they said. But a violent tidal current one unforeseen summer morning in Alaska had taken the brothers and ended Lesseps's career as a navigator. It had been his first lesson in the cruel unpredictability of life. No loss since then—not even the deaths of two of his own children—had shocked him in the same way. The memory of the La Borde brothers still stung, as if the losses sustained in his youth, before he'd learned to protect himself from attachment, would never quite heal.

“Monsieur de Lesseps?” the minister called from behind. “May I interest you in some cannons?”

Presumably the minister insisted on speaking in English for Dillon's sake. Lesseps found it incredibly irritating. “Are they for sale?” he asked in French.

Brass Guns

The cannons, four quite large and three smaller, had been placed on wooden pallets to protect the room's marble floors. Of all the items the minister had chosen to show Lesseps, these guns, it seemed to Dillon, were the most generic and therefore least likely to create a clear association with the expedition. He thought of other items he'd salvaged—an ornate silver candelabra, tarnished and bent but very distinctive, came immediately to mind—that might have compelled the inscrutable Monsieur de Lesseps to say, “Why, yes! This is the very one Monsieur de Lap
é
rouse had in his quarters…”

But he hadn't been consulted about which items would be displayed—an oversight that, it now occurred to Dillon, suggested the minister considered him a mere transporter of
stuff
rather than the knowledgeable explorer who'd recognized the items' importance and successfully negotiated the myriad difficulties involved in effecting their recovery. It was a sour realization, one of many that had steadily eroded the elation of the initial discovery three years before. He reflected, not for the first time, that Fortune was indeed a bitch. A man could fulfill his most cherished dreams—and hadn't he plied the waters of the South Pacific for decades hoping to discover the traces of Lap
é
rouse and his frigates?—yet find himself still subject to petty indignities from men of “superior” birth.

Lesseps approached the pallet, reached out to touch the worn and oxidized surface of one of the larger guns, and said with a boyish grin, “I never dared touch any of the cannons, but I always wanted to.”

The man's good cheer intensified Dillon's annoyance. Surely the identification of items from a lost expedition—an expedition whose loss you'd been mercifully spared—deserved some gravity? “Touch them all you like now, Monsieur de Lesseps,” Dillon couldn't stop himself from barking. “There's no one to say aught.”

*   *   *

Lesseps turned to look at Dillon. Had he offended somehow? Might they now be treated to a display of the Irishman's famous temper? He had a sudden urge to climb onto the pallet and straddle one of the cannons—see how that deflated the man's self-importance. But of course he'd never do such a thing—not in front of Baron Hyde de Neuville, whose good graces still mattered. And not even in front of this humorless Irish trader, who was probably writing a book about his adventures. It wouldn't do to appear in such an account as an antic fool.

He drew himself up and spoke with as much formality as he could muster. “We had cannons like these on both ships,” he said, indicating the larger ones. “They were never fired—not in anger, that is,” he said, remembering a salvo before the launch of a hot-air balloon in Concepci
ó
n and formal gun salutes on entering the harbors in Monterey and Macao and Petropavlovsk. “Not while I was with them,” he added, remembering what happened in the Navigators. Not that he
remembered
—the massacre happened after he left the expedition. But he remembered getting the terrible news, and he wondered again how it could have happened, for—pointing to the smaller cannons—“We had guns just like this mounted to the bows of each of our landing boats.” He heard Dillon exhale again with relief, but he was no longer inclined to make fun of the man. For really—how
was
it that four boats, so equipped, and manned, moreover, by armed officers and marines, could not overpower islanders with
rocks
? Captain de Langle had died in the battle, as had eleven other men, including Monsieur de Lamanon, whose sardonic pomposity Lesseps had always found more amusing than annoying, and a fusilier named Louis David who'd made a small fortune at cards.

Their deaths had never seemed quite real—
paper
deaths, he thought of them, their only proof the reports sent back from Botany Bay. Even less real, of course, were the deaths of the rest of them—
air
deaths, he regarded them, deaths by supposition. He'd refused to succumb to sorrow while hope remained of the expedition's eventual return, but as hope faded, grief had not taken its place—as if grief had its appointed season beyond which it became unavailable to experience.

“Are you all right, Monsieur de Lesseps?” Dillon asked.

He'd been unconsciously holding his hand against his left side, site of a chronic, hollow pain. “I'm fine,” he said, dropping his hand. “What is next?”